POETSWEDNESDAY & More

Recognition by Emily Vogel

Recognition

 

By Emily Vogel

 

To love poetry, you must first love nothing.

 

You must love the cricket caught in the jar,

how triumphant you felt when you captured it,

and how full of remorse you feel afterward,

all the weight of remorse, as you watch it pulsing

on that handful of grass you left it with.

 

But still, you want to examine

something that breathes, something that cries

when it feels pain, something with a mating call.

 

Dusk falls and comes to claim us

with the gray veneer of dreaming.

 

Something passes in your mind: a laundry truck,

an ephemera of fog, a thrown and soaring object,

like a shoe.

 

The body can be broken, but cannot transcend,

must expire and be rendered dispensable.

 

We are entertained by our bodies, by the bodies

of others. We are entertained by the cricket,

desire to commune with its small, inconsequential life.

 

Outside in the world, there is the commerce of poetry,

its imports and exports, its orgasms and funerals.

 

I know you are listening. Poetry wants to write you.

 

Outside in the world, people are laboring up useless mountains.

It affords the effort.

 

In your arms, nobody knows me but you.

 

River Mouth (In Memory of My Dead) by Joe Weil

River Mouth (In Memory of my Dead)

By Joe Weil

Among the dead leaves and debris,

around outcroppings of marl, the river swirls,

coughs up its shopping carts, and curls,

meandering toward the sea.

There, on the tidal flat, scudded,

scalloped by muskrat and coon print

at ebb tide, the old men squint,

their coin detectors flashing.

And what is it that they are after? Not Caesar’s head.

Knobby kneed, soft paunched,

their white pates bowed as egrets?

They call forth all that has been scavenged,

sea bilge, and weed sop, and the cry of hungry birds---

they are the moon descended from a cloud,

the fish crow falling on its Shad.

And most of their luck’s been bad

yet they can laugh out loud,

they who have spited the sea, who have parted

its long green hair with a prow, who now

stand shaking in the night’s first wind,

and call it kind which was ferocity,

and call it kith and kind which is their death,

and call it not at all, as they call out each to each,

here where the river’s mouth swallows the cum of the sea,

crying Abram, and Isaac and Jacob, until even the waves recede.

 

Emily Vogel

Emily Vogel’s poetry has been published widely, most recently in New York Quarterly, The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and The Journal of New Jersey Poets. She has published three chapbooks: Footnotes for a Love Letter (Foothills, 2008), An Intimate Acquaintance (Pudding House, 2009), and Elucidation Through Darkness (Split Oak Press, 2010). The Philosopher’s Wife, a full-length collection, was published in 2011 (Chester River Press), and a chapbook, Still Life With Man, (Finishing Line Press, 2012). She is the poetry editor of the online journal Ragazine, and teaches expository and creative writing at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College.

Joe Weil

 

Joe Weil is currently a professor at Binghamton University, and has taught graduate courses in both poetry and fiction. Prior to Binghamton, Weil founded the summer program for interactive arts at Arts High in Middlesex County, New Jersey. During Weil’s tenure as a master instructor in both poetry and fiction, his students won the Rutgers’ awards eight times (the highest award in poetry in NJ), and six of Weil’s students were admitted into the Governor’s school. Weil was also recognized by the NFFAA (a national high school awards foundation) twice as an outstanding teacher of the arts. Weil has appeared on PBS as well as reading his poetry on both NPR and Pacifica Public radio. He has been a featured poet with Stephen Dunn (winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize), Allen Ginsberg, as well as Louise Gluck, Thomas Lux, Gerald Stern, and Philip Levine. As a pianist and composer, Weil has had many works commissioned and has performed with such noteworthy musicians as Sweet Sue Terry, Perry Robinson, and Vic Ruggerio. His full length collections of poetry include What Remains (Nightshade Books), Painting the Christmas Trees (Texas Review Press), and The Plumber’s Apprentice (New York Quarterly books).